Maria Fotopoulos

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” said Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), leader of the Indian independence movement against Britain. In the U.S., and nations throughout the world, that’s a measure continuously tested, certainly as our global human population continues climbing. At 7.6 billion people and potentially headed to 11 or 12 billion, the pressure on all other living things is enormous, by way of habitat loss and other threats from Man.

Wildlife and the conservation community suffered a tremendous loss last week when Wayne Lotter was murdered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A well-known conservationist committed to ending elephant and giraffe poaching, Lotter was co-founder of the PAMS Foundation, which works for sustainable conservation solutions with local partners and communities.

On a dark Mozambique night just over a year ago, sleeping villagers were brutally attacked in their homes. It was coordinated, targeted violence against men who work to stop the poaching of some of the planet’s remaining rhinos. In the past, rhinos numbered in the millions and lived across vast stretches of Asia and Africa, but today a rhino is killed ever eight hours, and estimates indicate a mere 30,000 now live.

Earth’s human population now is at 7.6 billion, but that’s a number ever-shifting upwards. According to the World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, published recently by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, we add 83 million people annually.

The response to the shooting death of Harambe, a 17-year-old endangered Western lowland silverback male gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, has been highly charged and emotional. The shooting has provoked perhaps as much outrage as the killing last year of Cecil the Lion by a Minnesota dentist-cum-trophy hunter.

In President Obama’s State of the Union speech, he spoke of standing up for others, “the weak, the vulnerable.” He was talking about people. But it’s time to shift our anthropocentric bent and extend that standing to our fellow creatures, the wildlife worldwide who continued losing and suffering in 2015 under the enormous footprint of Homo sapiens.

Yet another majestic mountain lion has lost his life – in a hit and run – on a highly trafficked Southern California highway. This is the 14th mountain lion to die on L.A. area roads since a 2002 tracking study began.

Minnesota dentist Walter J. Palmer is much in the news for killing Cecil, a beloved 13-year-old Zimbabwe lion. Local celebrity Cecil was lured out of a protected national park with meat drug on a truck, shot with an arrow (but not killed) and then tracked for 40 hours before he was shot dead by a rifle. This is “trophy hunting.” Cecil then was skinned and beheaded, with his remains abandoned at the park border. Evidence indicates those involved in this horror marathon also tried to destroy Cecil’s tracking collar to cover their tracks.

As West Africa’s Ebola outbreak has continued gaining momentum over the last seven months, the global implications of this disease become clearer by the day. Most of us are only 24 hours away by air from this extremely infectious virus. That’s not to engender fear or panic, rather to spur discussion in several areas. What do borders mean in today’s hyper-connected world? How can governments, nonprofits, NGOs, the medical community and individuals work better together to achieve the best outcomes?

Tigers in Cambodia, India, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam, the golden frog of Panama, the Sumatran elephant, the Amur leopard, the polar bear and the mountain gorilla are just a few among too many examples of animals we are losing globally. Biodiversity is disappearing at epic rates.

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Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization that relies solely on donations. CAPS works to formulate and advance policies and programs designed to stabilize the population of California, the U.S. and the world at levels which will preserve the environment and a good quality of life for all.